FYI Roundup From the Web and Webmail

• Warner To Have Artist Channels, More Lucre From YouTube Deal
• Free Hip Hop App Offers Videos, News, Music…and More
• Brits Love Their Music Collections, Survey Finds
• Plundering the Past, Rock’s New Obsession
• Septuagenarians Still On the Road and One That’s 94
• New Partnership Makes Easy For Indie Acts To Sell Online
• How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll, Book Review
• Tom Waits’ Monty Python-Like Press Conference Video
• New Service To Target Smart Phones For Movie Screenings
• Lucinda Williams Ties the Knot On Stage At the Fillmore East
• Another Stinging ‘Mariah Carey’ Review
• 10 Rolling Stones Covers To Surprise and Amaze You
• First He Topped the Charts, Then Joe Meek Topped Himself
• Muddy Waters Waves Michael Buble Out From YouTube Top Spot
• Media & Broadcasting: Rogers, Corus, CTV, NAB, Parikhal
  

WARNER TUBE: After a nine-month long dispute over licensing terms, Warner Music Group has reached an agreement to return its tracks and music videos to the Google-owned online video platform YouTube.

The new deal will include sharing advertising revenues with YouTube on music videos offered by Warner Group from various artists including Michael Buble and Red Hot Chili Peppers, along with songs uploaded by users.

Warner Group yanked its repertoire from the website in December, claiming the payments didn’t reasonably compensate the label or its songwriters and artists.

As per the new arrangement, Warner Group will have a larger share of advertising revenues because it’s also taking the onus of selling ads via third party agencies.

Artists will now have their own separate channels that will pave the way for enhanced fan interaction. In addition, it will further let marketers to target a better-defined customer group.

HIP HOP APP: Hip-hop mobile content specialist UrbanWorld Wireless has released a self-titled app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The free app, which has been downloaded 30,000 times since its release a week ago, offers urban music news, full-length hip hop videos, music and pics.

Liz Lee, director of content for UrbanWorld Wireless, said: “Our goal is to supply engaging content that trendsetting urban youth crave and deliver it in a rich and memorable way. It’s great news for those that embrace the hip-hop lifestyle, but even better news for our marketing partners that want to reach them.”

BRITS LOVE MUSIC – NME : The average number of music albums owned by each man in the UK is 292, while the average amount owned by each woman is 221, the results of a new survey suggest. According to the results, men spend an average of £12,480 on music in their lifetime. Women surveyed were estimated to spend £9,120.

JURASSIC ROCK – New Statesman : People say this doesn’t matter. In an incredible volte-face, pop writers are no longer sneering at re-formed bands. It’s no longer embarrassing but OK, they say, as long as they don’t attempt any new material. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? Everyone wants to justify their desire to retrieve a few morsels from the dustbin of history. As consumers, we want to possess the past. Our belief that it’s possible seems reasonable, in this age of the playlist approach to music. This method of delivery makes everything feel contemporaneous. There’s no worn record sleeve to remind us of the gap between then and now. It feels like an easy step to recall entertainers from every historical period, even though it’s clear the practice has generated monsters.

This attitude lies behind the present pandemic of cultural grave-robbing. Triceratops and T Rex are the latest veteran rockers to be summoned from Beyond. The Walking With Dinosaurs live experience brings visitors face to face with lifesize replicas of their favourites.

SEPTUAGENARIAN ROCK – Independent: “Don’t want to stay alive when you’re 25″ go the words of Mott the Hoople’s 1972 hit “All the Young Dudes”, written by David Bowie. Several decades on, the band’s frontman, Ian Hunter, begs to differ.

Now 70 – that’s 70! – he is to embark on a series of sell-out shows at the Hammersmith Apollo in London this week to mark the 40th anniversary of the band, which hasn’t played together since splitting up 35 years ago. He is not alone. More than half a century after they first emerged, rock musicians born before the outbreak of the Second World War are still rolling on.

Many of the septuagenarians have survived rock ‘n’ roll’s wildest years, when drink and drugs were the staples of life on the road. But they’ll have some way to go to match blues legend David “Honeyboy” Edwards, who performs tonight in Swansea on a tour of Europe and the US. He is a sprightly 94. A who’s who list here

Reverb Store Walkthrough from Ferol Vernon on Vimeo.

A week ago ReverbNation and Audiolife announced a partnership dubbed the Reverb Store. Currently in private beta, the free offering, which goes public in October, enables artists to design physical and digital goods online and sell them without upfront expense. Products are produced on-demand and delivered to the fan. This video offers a graphic walk through the Reverb Store.

BOOK UPTURNS BEATLES – Paste Magazine: In 2004, music writer Elijah Wald released Escaping The Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, which trenchantly revised decades of mythology masquerading as history. “As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure,” Wald argued, “and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note.” The book wasn’t a hatchet job—more like reconstructive surgery to remove decades of conventional wisdom from our collective consciousness.

Now Wald is back with an even more ambitious—and potentially more incendiary—volume called How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music. In the course of 254 pages, Wald makes room for the fox trot, the turkey trot, the bunny hug, the jitterbug, brass bands, swing bands, racism, prohibition, jukeboxes, phonographs, radio payola and even disco balls (which, he notes in one of many interesting asides, were common in the 1920s). What he doesn’t cover in satisfactory depth is how, exactly, the Beatles destroyed rock ’n’ roll.

Sometime in the next couple of months, Tom Waits is releasing a live album taken from his Glitter & Doom tour. Above is a video of Waitts’ conducting a press conference for that tour last year. If you haven’t seen it yet, his fertile imagination and off-beat humour make it well worth doing so.

MOVIES ON PHONES: mSpot, a five-year-old mobile entertainment company based in Palo Alto, Calif., is launching a new service making full-length feature movies available on demand to 40 million cell phone subscribers in the US. Owners of 30 different high-end phones, including the iPhone, Palm Pre, Blackberry Tour and Storm, on all four wireless carriers, will now be able to enter mSpot.com into their phones browsers for the pleasure of streaming what the company promises will be an expanding roster of films.

The company says it has signed deals with Paramount Studios, Universal Pictures and The Weinstein Company. It also says it is in talks with the other major studios. Movies will be available a few weeks after they become available on DVD like in the pay-per-view movies are.

“With so many people watching TV episodes and movies on their iPhones, mobile phones are now viewed as an entertainment device,” said Darren Tsui, mSpot’s chief executive, who agreed that the prospect of watching films on a phone seemed unlikely (and perhaps absurd) even three years ago. Movies on the service will cost $4.99 a title, and can be watched anywhere from 24 hours to 5 days after they’re rented.

THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS has this to say about Mariah Carey’s latest candy-coated confection:  “…Like some female equivalent to R.Kelly, most of the new songs feature no more than 3 notes a piece, repeated in a sing-songy drone. As sheer craft, it’s so depressing, even something like Foreigner’s “I Want To Know What Love Is” (which Carey covers at the CD’s close) sounds like The Beatles by comparison.

To camouflage the bare tunes, Carey over-indulges her most mocked features: those rococo melismas and that shrieking tea-kettle whistle. One track, “Angel (The Prelude)” consists of nothing but the latter.

The instrumentation proves just as eagerly artificial. If there’s a non-synthezed instrument here, it’s keeping itself well hidden. Carey even carries over the impersonal nature of the CD to her lyrics. Despite the “Memoir” moniker, there isn’t a single telling disclosure. Or so we have reason to presume. Though this is her first CD since she married Nick Cannon, only two tracks treat love as anything but an act of betrayal or a spur to longing.

The result may mean to mirror the youthful frustrations of hip-hop-inflected R&B but it’s an antique version of it. R&B stars like Beyonce and Keisha Cole have lately progressed into something far more sophisticated than this. Coupled with the nervous over-correction of her voice, the result makes Carey seem like the proverbial aging actress who’s trying so hard to cover her perceived flaws, all she does is call more attention to them.”

LUCINDA WILLIAMS played Gotham’s Fillmore this past weekend — but it has nothing to do with the music.

The queen of roots-rock got married onstage.

When the post-vows hail of confetti settled, her band came out and backed her on a rocking rendition of AC/DC’s “Long Way to the Top.” Her brand-new husband, 51-year-old Tom Overby (also her manager), strapped on a guitar and played on the Rolling Stones’ “Happy.” Then, Williams says, “I grabbed him and brought him up to the mike, and he sang with me on it. It was so cool,” The NY Post reports.

10 STONES COVERS – The Delete Bin: These days, the Stones are known as a seemingly eternal rock ‘n’ roll brand, with a rather straightforward approach that doesn’t appear to take too many chances beyond an established musical template.  Yet, a lot of critics, and even some of the fans, forget that Jagger and Richards are accomplished songwriters, putting out tunes in their heyday that were not only immediate pop hits, but were also as highly interpretable as anything Lennon and McCartney ever put out.

The thing that strikes me most about their work is how prescient it is in terms of stylistic changes to the trajectory of rock music.  In much of their work, they seemed to anticipate the development of blues rock, country-rock, and even post punk well before those ideas developed.

So, here are 10 Rolling Stones covers to surprise and amaze you.  You’ll notice that many of them are as far removed from what you might think as being songs written by Jagger and Richards, who have become less known for their incredible songwriting past, and more for their tenacity as a touring unit.  Yet the fact that acts as disparate as The Sundays, The Feelies, and Ike & Tina could pick and choose tunes from the Jagger/Richards songbook reveals the measurement of the quality of the songs themselves. Link here to read more and listen to the 10 covers…

JOE MEEK - Telegraph: In the 15 years that actor-turned-director Nick Moran spent bringing Telstar to the screen, he’d tell people: “It’s about a gay, speed-addicted, devil-worshipping, tone-deaf Gloucestershire farmhand, who built a little recording studio over a shop and made one of the biggest-selling records of all time.”

He might also have said the subject of his film – legendary pop producer Joe Meek – was a paranoid monster who could veer between outbursts of venomous fury and displays of warmth and affection in the blink of an eye.

From his cramped little studio, using home-made and army-surplus devices, Meek became a low-budget Phil Spector, creating a string of distinctive, echo-heavy hit records: Johnny Remember Me by John Leyton, Heinz’s Just Like Eddie and the Honeycombs’ Have I the Right?

Telstar was easily the biggest – a simple, almost childlike tune with a fairground atmosphere, enhanced by sound effects evoking radio signals and outer space.

Co-written by Meek and Geoff Goddard, it was an ode to the world’s first telecommunications satellite. Released in 1962 at the height of public excitement about the space race, it became the first British single to top America’s Billboard charts.

Popular YouTubePages Today
1.      Youtube Music Top Songs: Mannish Boy – Muddy Waters 29.79%
2.      Youtube Music Top Songs: Everything – Michael Buble 18.54%
3.      Youtube Music Top Songs: You Complete Me – Keyshia Cole 18.45%
4.      Youtube Music Top Songs: I’m Yours (Radio Edit) – Jason Mraz 8.41%
5.      Youtube Music Top Songs: It Happens – Sugarland 6.87%
6.      Youtube Music Top Songs: You Raise Me Up (Radio Edit) – Josh Groban 4.29%
7.      Youtube Music Top Songs: Caribbean Blue – Enya 3.61%
8.      Youtube Music Top Songs: Solitary Thinkin’ – Lee Ann Womack 3.52%
9.      Youtube Music Top Songs: She’s Country – Jason Aldean 3.26%
10.      Youtube Music Top Songs: Before the Next Teardrop Falls – Freddy Fender 3.26%

MEDIA & BROADCASTING: Rogers Radio has decided to take JACK FM CKLG-FM 96.9 Vancouver mostly jockless.  Pink slipped are midday host Pam Stevens and p.m. drive host Kelly Latremouille.  Also cut, promotions co-ordinator May Lam. Mornings remain intact with Larry (Hennessey) &  Willy (Percy).  There will be no on air voices after 10 am. Larry Cogan is said to be providing the voice tracking.

CORUS has announced plans to add Nickelodeon, one of the world’s leading entertainment brands for kids, to its premiere portfolio of kid-focused services. The launch of the 24-hour kids channel is November 2.

CTV has relaunched CTV.ca, the online destination for Canada’s most-watched prime-time television shows and News. The refurbished site offers a revitalized online look, simplified navigation, more options for users to access and customize national and local News pages, and better search function.  Responding to the growing demand for shows and entertainment online, CTV.ca makes it easier to find program features, video online and exclusive celebrity news. The redesign provides a more robust platform to provide an audience-centric Web experience, and a springboard for future development.

RADIO LACKS INNOVATION – RBR.com:  If there was one recurring theme at last week’s NAB Radio Show in Philadelphia, it was that radio leaders are well outside of the most attractive demos – and getting older. But consolidation and the current recession have made it difficult to hire and grow the leaders of tomorrow.

Regent Communications CEO Bill Stakelin raised the issue in the Radio Group Heads Super Session, putting himself among those radio executives who are getting “long in the tooth.”

The same concern was expressed over and over by speakers in the session called “Radio Stimulus Package.”

“We are fast becoming an industry of old men,” said Larry Rosin, President, Edison Media Research, excluding the only female and younger panelist, Heidi Raphael, Vice President Corporate Communications, Greater Media.

“We have to raise the quality of programming,” declared Bill Figenshu, President, Broadcast Operations and Development, Peak Broadcasting. He complained that program directors are currently managing too many stations, leaving them with little time for real innovation. He called for efforts to bring in more young people. “It’s time for radio to make stations we are proud of,” he said.

… “Stop nostalgically looking back at the good old days,” said Fred Jacobs, President, Jacobs Media. He lamented the lack of strategic thinking in radio and declared that programming for PPM, because it measures audience minute by minute, is killing innovation. “It’s personalities that people care about,” Jacobs noted. But who is developing the new personalities that radio needs for the future?

John Parikhal, CEO, Joint Communications Corp., had harsh words for the current leaders of the largest radio groups. “Stop lying to yourselves,” he said. Parikhal declared that the top people have made mistakes and that none of the new initiatives implemented in recent years have worked. “Kill all czars,” he proclaimed, because rule by czars – top-down management – always fails. Instead, innovation has to come from the lower ranks and move up in the organization.

LA KINGS - NYT: If your business depends on free publicity from newspapers, what do you do when the papers can no longer afford to send reporters to cover you? In professional sports, the answer, increasingly, is hire your own. The Los Angeles Kings last week hired Rich Hammond of The Los Angeles Daily News to write about the team for its Web site.